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ans Serif">Your four email commandments:
1. Thou shalt do it the Internet way
2. Thou shalt concentrate on the subject line.
3. Thou shalt know your audience
4. Thou shalt only do "WIIFM's"

ans Serif">Let me elaborate one by one:

ans Serif">1. Thou shalt do it the Internet way
Just about everyone is frantically busy in this day and age.. With the new mix of immediacy and technology, there's an enormous amount of information overload we all have to deal with. How many radio stations, tv stations, newspapers, magazines are competing for eyeballs in the actual world? This is of course in tandem with the online world of interoffice emails, marketing emails, bulletins, online news feeds etc, etc, etc.

ans Serif">When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed in the USA, the world wide news coverage started immediately and continually.

ans Serif">So what do people want when they read on the Internet?

• ans Serif">They want to scan items quickly.
• ans Serif">They want clean, uncluttered reading
• ans Serif">They do not want lots of graphics - especially moving distracting graphics.

ans Serif">Give it to them.

• ans Serif">Keep your emails formatted so they're easily scanned (quick to read).
• ans Serif">Break content and articles up by using lots of titles and subtitles.
• ans Serif">Keep the graphics to a minimum.
• ans Serif">Use lots of bullet points
• ans Serif">Perhaps start with a quick executive summary. Hopefully you'll get at least one paragraph read.
• ans Serif">Consider taking the main facts and bullet pointing them.
• ans Serif">Have lots of white space.
• ans Serif">Don't just copy and paste. Rewrite from the readers perspective
• ans Serif">Put your most important "point" or line at the beginning of the message.

ans Serif">2. Thou shalt concentrate on the subject line.
People have only four things in which to judge whether or not to open an email. Who it's from, who it's to, what the subject line says and how big it is/whether there's an attachment or not.

ans Serif">1. Who it's from
People will respond better if your email is coming from a person rather than a company. Remember people do business with people. In this day and age, people know by reading an email address that they can figure out what company that individual is from. So instead of having the from read: Your Company, or the name of the newsletter, have it read you@your company. Your reader is more likely to open and respond to a message from johndoe@yourcompany than a more general company address.

ans Serif">2. Who's it to
If you are sending an email to someone as blind carbon copy (BCC) the standard procedure is to put your name in the To: column and then put all the recipients names in the BCC. This way they will not see all the other email addresses of all the other recipients getting the email (this does happen if you put their email address in the To: or CC: column). But in the inbox, they will see it isn't addressed to them. So will they open it?

ans Serif">Likewise a common practice is to have the actual newsletter or email name appear in the From: column.